Racial and Religious Intolerance

I know a lot of racially intolerant people. I come from a fairly conservative family, and so I see it a lot. Especially in the older generation. For instance, if I were to marry a black man, or even date one, my grandpa would probably disown me. The only advice he gave me before I left for Hawaii was, "Don't go over there and marry a Polynesian."

I had another instance of racial intoleration. To give you a little background I should explain where I am coming from. I have lived in Utah for most of my life, and while I don't want to make any ultra-broad generalizations, I have noticed that many people are not very racially tolerant. This is probably because we are mostly white.

Well, now I live in a place where whites are the minority. I have never had that happen before in my life, and it is quite an adjustment. I am sure that it is an adjustment for many students that come here from the mainland. And some of us handle it better than others.

So, one of the guys that I went to Pearl Harbor with yesterday is Pakistani. He's a really nice guy, and he is always willing to help me and my roommates out. So, I told someone that this guy, S, was taking me and my roommate to Pearl Harbor.

And this person got a really disgusted look on their face and said, "Ew! You're going with S?"
I said, "Yeah, he's really nice."
And they said, "Yeah, he's nice, but he's Pakistani."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Well, he invades personal space and he asks all these personal questions. And, he just is weird."

Now, I know the person that said this, and honestly, it didn't shock me that much. That's how they have been for most of our stay here. If someone does something different than us, then somehow it is wrong.

The other part of this blog is religious intolerance. As I have stated before I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS, or Mormon Church. And, since I live in Utah which is about 75% Mormon, I don't see a lot of religious intolerance. This has also changed since living in Hawaii.

My computer broke a couple weeks ago, and so DELL sent out a technician to fix it. He was extremely friendly and talked a lot with me. I had my scriptures out on the table, and he happened to notice them. He said, "Oh, you read the bible?" And I said, "Yeah, I have the Bible and the Book of Mormon in that set." As soon as I said the word Book of Mormon, it was like he turned off. It didn't offend me too much, I was a little sad that we couldn't go back to what we were talking about before.

Also, there is a new show on HBO that has the Mormon community up in arms. I don't like HBO anyway, so this wasn't a big shocker. The show is called, "Big Love," and it's a show about a family in suburban Salt Lake City that "happens" to be polygamist. Now, the show stresses that the LDS church banned polygamy in 1890, and that the characters in the show are not LDS. However, the show is filled with parodies of the LDS religion. Also, one wonders why they chose SLC if they didn't want to draw a connection to the LDS church.

I have gotten about 50 emails from people telling me to write HBO and tell them to take the show off the air. However, being in public relations I believe the saying, "No publicity is bad publicity." People are going to watch the show just because it is creating such a riot. Thus, defeating the purpose.

Okay, so now I am sort of rambling, but my point is, religious intolerance is just as bad as racial intolerance. And tolerance is different than acceptance. Maybe we should just learn how to accept other races and religions, rather than just tolerate them.

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